Load Media Range (Path)

Load Media Range (Upload) refuses anything over ComfyUI's ~100 MB upload cap, and copying a huge movie into your input folder just to trim it is wasteful. Load Media Range (Path) is the answer: identical A-B range picker, same waveform preview, but it reads the file directly from an absolute path on disk. Nothing gets uploaded, nothing gets copied into ComfyUI/input - you point it at the file and cut.

It's the third corner of the media-loading trio in ComfyUI ALICE Lab Audio Tools, the alpha-stage pack (Apache 2.0, no pip deps, bilingual EN/JA) from ALICE Lab. The Pack README frames it exactly right: use the Upload variant for normal files you want in your input folder, use this one when the media exceeds the upload limit or when you don't want a copy sitting around.

How it works

The only new input is media_path - a STRING that must be an absolute path to a supported file (mp4, mov, mkv, wav, mp3, m4a, ogg, flac, and the rest of the extension list in the README). The node validates that it's absolute and has a supported extension, probes it with ffprobe for duration, and otherwise behaves exactly like the Upload variant: ffmpeg extracts the selected range as 44.1 kHz stereo AUDIO, and if the source has video you also get a trimmed VIDEO object.

Nice touch in the source: the media_path widget carries vhs_path_extensions metadata, so if you have Video Helper Suite installed, the plain text box upgrades into VHS's server-side path browser. No VHS, no problem - it's just a normal path field.

Inputs and outputs

Inputs: media_path, start_seconds, end_seconds (millisecond steps, same as the Upload node). Outputs, in order:

• audio - the selected range, 44.1 kHz stereo.
• start_seconds / end_seconds / duration_seconds - the actual selection.
• video - the trimmed VIDEO when the source has video.

The interactive controls are identical too: drag A/B, 10 ms nudges, zoom, pan, play/loop the selection.

The gotchas, and they're real ones

Two things to respect here. First, the ComfyUI server process needs permission to read whatever path you give it - if it errors, that's usually a permissions or PATH problem, not the node. Second, and this is the one to take seriously: this node will happily read any absolute path on the machine. The README's warning is blunt - "Use this node only on a trusted ComfyUI server. Do not expose unrestricted server-side paths to untrusted users." On a shared or internet-exposed ComfyUI instance, that's a file-read vector; on your local machine, it's just convenient. Don't build a public server workflow around it.

Install

# ComfyUI Manager → search "ComfyUI ALICE Lab Audio Tools" → Install → restart
# or:
cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/alice-lab-dev/ComfyUI-ALICE-Lab-Audio-Tools
# restart, then Add Node → ALICE_Lab → Media

Pack-wide requirements apply: ffmpeg + ffprobe on the ComfyUI process PATH (macOS Homebrew paths auto-checked) and a current ComfyUI with the AUDIO/VIDEO types. No model downloads, no Python dependencies.